6/24/13

Man, it sure has been a while since my last post. I admit that it's mostly my fault, although these past few days of high heat and humidity really haven't helped. Anyway, I've got some of the basics done. I spent a while looking at various libraries that I've used in the past, and decided that my engine will use Allegro. Here's why I didn't pick one of the other three:

GLUT: Glut is kinda terrible. Prior to my last game, I had figured that I'd just been using it wrong, but it seemed that wasn't the case. It's very light on features, so light that there are certain things that you simply cannot do--things like making the window's size fixed, which caused all sorts of trouble for me. The way it rigidly forces input callbacks was quite annoying as well. All in all, I decided not to use it in future projects.

SFML: SFML always felt a bit weird. I can't really put my finger on why, but it just sorta...annoys me. Maybe it's that I didn't yet fully understand what I was doing when I ran into it, or maybe it's something about the syntax itself. I'm not too sure.

SDL: When it came down to the final two, I honestly wasn't sure what to pick. In the end, I chose Allegro because I had more experience with it, and my adviser at college knows his way around it. That seemed like a good enough reason. I've gotten the impression, however, that SDL is exceptionally powerful, and may provide more than Allegro. I may have to use it a bit more and see for myself.

Anyway, with that choice made I've begun to integrate Allegro with my partially finished entity handling code. The result is a bunch of red boxes flying around that disappear when clicked. I wouldn't say it's too impressive, but it's a pretty good start. If all goes to plan, I'll start on AMAZE proper by the end of the week.

6/15/13

I imagine most of you know I'm 18(although that's about to change), or wouldn't have much trouble finding out. Thanks to the power of social networking, it's pretty easy now to get at all kinds of info on someone. At the time of posting, however, only a select few people know that I own a cane. It's certainly not something that you might expect for someone of my age. Today, I will explain why I own such a thing, and how that relates to last week's lack of work.

6/10/13

It's been a bit too long since my last post, but I have some great news. As if you hadn't guessed from the title, Singularity v1.5 is now complete enough to that it'll do for the moment. I can now move on to AMAZE, and spend the next couple of weeks testing it out and looking for bugs. There are several features that I wanted to add, but they aren't too urgent.